Seconds to Disaster: US Edition (2 page)

Fans of the actor Robin
Williams may recall one of his stand-up sketches. Acting the part of an airline
captain, he steps on stage to give his pre-flight public announcement and in
the process confesses his own troubles.

“Good morning, ladies and
gentlemen, this is your captain speaking and welcome on board your flight,”
Williams’ spiel begins. “Not terrific weather out there, I think you’ll agree.
It’s raining pretty hard, with some bad gusting and there’s some amazing
lightning over on the port side if you’re interested. Wow! See that flash? Not
a great morning for flying, is it? Hey, I guess it’s not exactly a great
morning for me either. To tell the truth, my wife left me last night. After
twenty years of marriage. She said that she couldn’t live with my depressive
moods anymore and that I was dragging her down. I ask you, after twenty years?
Have you any idea of the kind of mental anguish that can cause a man? I mean,
I’ve been sitting up all night just thinking about those cruel words and
they’ve cut the damned heart out of me.” Williams pauses, wipes imaginary tears
from his eyes, then beams a manic smile. “But hey, that’s enough about me, who
wants to hear about my problems? So how about we just speed this big metal bird
down the runway and up into the sky and see what the hell happens?”

At that stage, wise passengers would be running,
screaming for the exits.

The point is pilots are human.
They cut and bleed just like everyone else.

The vast majority are very
professional men and women. Some have displayed inordinate courage, heroism,
skill, tenacity and ability, protecting their passengers’ lives in catastrophic
aviation incidents.

They are not supermen, or
women, but ordinary people just like you and me. You see them in the
supermarket, pushing trolleys. You meet them in the golf club, or in a
restaurant or bar.

You may know them as
neighbors, relatives, brothers or sisters, casual acquaintances or friends.
Like everyone else, they have their weaknesses and strengths, their vices and
virtues. Like everyone else, they often have to bear their share of life’s
problems.

Among their number are counted
all religions, and atheists and agnostics. They can be family-oriented men and
women, or singles, philanderers, homosexuals, lesbians or transvestites. You
name it, the cockpit’s seen them all—neither should anyone care what their crews’
orientation is so long as it doesn’t interfere with the carrying out of their
job nor in any way affect their level of professional skills.

Some pilots live quiet,
purposeful lives. Others have stormy relationships or affairs, and battle with
inner demons. As evidence, some have been removed from or arrested on aircraft
while under the influence of alcohol—aircraft they were about to board and fly,
laden with hundreds of passengers whose care had been placed in their hands.  And
as we shall see in the next chapter, some—like Williams’ fictional captain—have
troubled personal lives, which can sometimes cause them to experience nervous
breakdowns mid-flight, and with dire and even deadly consequences.

Sometimes, like everyone else,
pilots get overtired or don’t feel too good on a day when they have to do their
job. And what an important job it is—the fate of dozens or perhaps hundreds of
lives might rest daily in their hands. Yet with the rise of low-fares carriers that
pare costs to the bone, it is a job that it is increasingly poorly paid when
one considers the expertise, training requirements and responsibilities
demanded of pilots.

The industry in recent years
has experienced what insiders call “a dumbing down.” Salaries have been cut,
training budgets have been trimmed. Command-hour requirements—the standards
needed to attain the pilot rank of captain—have at times been drastically
reduced because airlines want their new captains younger, cheaper and
inherently less experienced.

It may surprise readers to
learn in this book that there are pilots flying in the US whose salaries are so
low they qualify for food stamps; they live in crash pads, time-sharing bunks
with other crews because they cannot afford a place of their own. This problem
is not unique to the US. In the United Kingdom there are pilots who live in
squalid trailers within earshot of London’s bustling Heathrow International
Airport, because LIKE their US counterparts, they cannot afford to pay for
transport costs and decent accommodation out of dismal salaries. It’s also not
unknown for junior co-pilots of prime low fares carriers to sleep overnight in
cars between duties.

We will explore such issues
later, for dozens of air carriers worldwide pay their pilots comparatively
meager salaries and some none at all—men and women whose skill sets and
well-being govern the fate of hundreds of thousands of people who travel on
passenger aircraft on thousands of commercial flights on five continents daily
around the world.

Lives, it seems, are sometimes
almost as cheap as the low-fare tickets that many passengers seek.

Not surprisingly in this modern world the pilot’s share
of emotional and psychological problems are on the rise, as shown in a report
commissioned by the British Airline Pilots Association. It found levels of
self-reported fatigue, sleep problems and symptoms of anxiety and depression
higher than would be expected in a general population.
[6]
Aviation is not restricted by borders; is it safe to assume these problems are
not exclusive to Europe and may be an issue in the US and elsewhere?

And this type of study does
not appear to have been carried out in the US, yet since Jet Blue Capt. Clayton
Osbon had a breakdown mid-flight in March of 2012, there have been calls for
stricter mental screening of pilots, to prevent mentally unstable crew from
entering cockpits.
[7]
Judging by the frightening results of the British survey there appears to be
dangerous situation brewing. Perhaps it’s the increasing pressures placed on
those crew that needs to be investigated?

Although much of it is due to
life’s increasingly demanding stresses that affect us all, including financial
pressures, in the case of pilots it means heavier work schedules, extra flying
hours, and as a result, increased fatigue. And as any pilot will tell you,
fatigue in the cockpit is a deadly beast.

Mental and physical fatigue,
along with overwork and long duty hours, have led to confusion and errors in
the cockpit; which in turn have led to potentially serious incidents and to
fatal accidents causing many thousands of deaths and injuries in air crashes
over the years. In fact fatigue is known to be a factor in 20 percent of
aircraft accidents.

Lesser known by the public,
suicide has also been committed in the cockpit by stressed and mentally
unstable pilots, and with deadly results.

The US government estimates
that about 31,000 Americans die each year as a result of suicide. Worldwide,
the number is in the millions. There are many motives—depression, shame, rage,
anger, loss of love. But when problems overflow into pilots’ professional lives
and they kill themselves in the course of their duty hours, during a flight,
there is often the added massive tragedy of the deaths of passengers.

Fortunately, the majority of
pilots are highly-competent, highly-trained, professional men and women whose
skills help prevent accidents, not cause them. But because humans are sometimes
unpredictable, and because there is no such thing as absolute security, that
protection can never be entirely guaranteed. There are rogue pilots who don’t
pay attention to the rules, pilots who falsify log books pretending to have
more flight experience than they actually do, pilots who claim they were
captains with their previous companies who in fact were always first officers,
all to get a job. There are pilots who perhaps should never be allowed fly an airplane
with fare paying passengers onboard.

John Greaves is an ex-airline
captain with over 10,000 hours of flight time. A seasoned airline accident
lawyer, Greaves has witnessed the heartache of families and loved ones of hundreds
of airline accident victims in more than 35 airline disasters, including 911
victims. “Airlines are upgrading captains, who have no business being captains,”
he says and he is not alone in his thoughts. Thankfully, the rogues are an
extreme minority.

However, as the events of
September 11
^th
vividly demonstrated though, sometimes the mad, the
bad and the truly dangerous can slip through the net.

For most of his life, to
everyone who knew him, Japan Airlines Captain Seiji Katagiri seemed like a
really nice guy.

A professional pilot who
occasionally enjoyed playing golf in his spare time, he had flown for Japan
Airlines for much of his twenty-two year career. The father of two children, he
and his wife lived in Tokyo’s middle-class suburb of Yeisha, in a neat
two-story house a short drive from the city’ airport of Haneda.

But Katagiri had a troubled
mind.

When he began suffering from
hallucinations and depression, his wife worried about his behavior. Katagiri
once summoned police to his home and tried to convince them his home was
bugged. A police search turned up no listening devices.

On at least three occasions
his boss urged him to seek psychiatric help. Katagiri was given a month’s
leave.

When he returned to the flight
deck, on February 9
^th
, 1982, he captained Flight 350, a domestic
crossing from Fukuoka to Tokyo. However, his employer, JAL, had not ensured
that a vital company requirement be complied with—before Katagiri’s
reinstatement as a captain he would have to log at least twenty-five hours of
supervised flying time.

It was a mistake that
contributed to the chilling event that next unfolded.

As Katagiri made the final
approach into Tokyo, the captain cracked-up at the controls and threw two of
the DC-8’s engines into reverse, which caused the plane to plunge into the icy
waters of Tokyo Bay, three hundred yards short of the runway.

Twenty-four people died
needlessly that day.

Katagiri survived and was one
of the first to be taken aboard the rescue boat—unthinkable for a captain to be
among the first to leave his ship—muttering to himself and telling his rescuers
that he was an office worker. Katagiri later told police he felt ill on the
morning of the flight. “Then just before landing, I felt nausea, a feeling of
terror and lost consciousness.”

Captain Katagiri was
eventually found to be mentally ill. Tried, he was found not guilty by reason
of insanity and detained in a secure psychiatric unit.
[8]

Captain Katagiri isn’t the
only pilot who has snapped on the flight deck and decided to kill himself and
his passengers, and no doubt he won't be the last.

In August 1994, on a domestic
Royal Air Maroc flight to Casablanca from Agadir, the young captain, Younes
Khyati, thirty-two, decided not just to end his own life, but those of his
forty-eight passengers. An experienced pilot with 4,500 flying hours, Khyati
was physically fit and had undergone a rigorous annual medical examination a
month previous.

He showed no outward signs of
mental illness, or psychological troubles.

But ten minutes after
take-off, Khyati inexplicably switched off the autopilot at 15,000 feet and
nosed the aircraft straight down. The female co-pilot radioed Casablanca. “Mayday,
Mayday, the pilot is—.” The message ended abruptly as the pilot plunged the
airliner into the Atlas Mountains, killing everyone on board.

Motives have never been found
to explain what crash investigators called Captain Khyati’s “incomprehensible
gesture.”

Some suicide-by-pilot cases
are even more bizarre. And none more bizarre than Egypt Air Flight 990.

The exact reason for the crash
is still disputed by US and Egyptian authorities, who offered conflicting factors.
Both US and Egyptian authorities conducted a joint investigation. Yet all the
available facts point to an undeniable, chilling scenario that unfolded on
board the scheduled Los Angeles-New York-Cairo flight on October 31, 1999.

At approximately 1:50 a.m.
EST. Egypt Air Flight 990—a Boeing 767 named Tuthmosis III after a pharaoh from
the 8
^th
Dynasty—plunged into the Atlantic, sixty miles south of
Nantucket Island, Massachusetts, in International waters. All 217 passengers on
board were killed.

A rigorous investigation by US
investigators concluded that the aircraft was crashed deliberately, in a case
of pilot-suicide. One of the flight crew, First Officer Gameel Al-Batouti took
charge of the flight controls when the captain excused himself to go to the
bathroom, a conversation which was recorded by the cockpit voice recorder.
Thirty seconds later the voice recorder registered First Officer Al-Batouti,
who was then alone in the cockpit, say, “I rely on God.”

A minute later the autopilot
was disengaged, followed by Al-Batouti again saying: “I rely on God.”

Three seconds later, both
engine throttles were reduced to zero and the elevators were moved 3 degrees,
nosing the aircraft down. Six more times First-Officer Al-Batouti repeated “I
rely on God” before the captain burst into the cockpit, demanding, “What’s
happening?”
[9]

The flight data recorders
suggest that the captain may have grasped the controls and commanded the nose
up, while Al-Batouti commanded a nose down, at the same time that the engines
were shut down.

The captain was heard demanding
in a panicked voice: “What is this? Did you shut the engines?”

After an apparent struggle to
take control of the aircraft, the left engine was torn from the wing by the
extreme stress of the aircraft’s maneuvers. Less than a minute later Flight 990
plummeted into the icy Atlantic, killing everyone on board. 

In the aftermath of Flight
990’s crash, in what could only be described as a further bizarre twist,
Egyptian investigators concluded that their aircraft crashed solely as a result
of mechanical failure. They chose to ignore all the pointed evidence from the
cockpit voice recorder and the aircraft’s flight data recorders—contained in
the black boxes—data which indisputably pointed to suicide-by-pilot.

The US NTSB investigation,
however, was published on March 21, 2002, after an eighteen month
investigation, and this is their conclusion:

“The National Transportation
Safety Board determines that the probable cause of the Egypt Air Flight 990
accident is the airplane’s departure from normal cruise flight and subsequent
impact with the Atlantic Ocean as a result of the relief first officer’s flight
control inputs. The reason for the relief first officer’s actions was not
determined.”

Despite the glaring evidence
in the NTSB’s possession, the essence of the report appears watered down. By
then, post 9/11, Egypt was an important ally in the war against the “Axis of
evil.” The US did not wish to overly offend its cordial relations with Egypt.
Blame was laid at the first officer’s door but there was certainly some
watering down of the report, no doubt deemed necessary for the Egyptians to
save face.

In fact, Egypt’s ECAA final
report, based largely on the NTSB’s, came to an entirely different conclusion
from precisely the
same
data:

“The Relief First Officer…did
not deliberately dive the airplane into the ocean. Nowhere in the 1,665 pages
of the NTSB’s document or in the eighteen months of investigation effort is
there any evidence to support the so called ‘deliberate act theory’. In fact,
the record contains specific evidence refuting such a theory, including an
expert evaluation by Dr. Adel Fouad, a highly experienced psychiatrist.”

The Egyptians continue to lay
the blame upon mechanical failure, a truly bizarre conclusion considering the
NTSB evidence.

In search of a motive for
Al-Batouti’s behavior, international media reports suggested that he been
reprimanded for sexual harassment—a serious charge within the Moslem airline.
The reprimand had been made by Al-Batouti’s boss, who happened to be on board
the doomed plane.

But no mention was made in
Egyptian newspapers at the time of the sexual harassment accusations against
Al-Batouti.

One can only guess at the
reasons for the illogical stance taken by the Egyptian authorities. National
pride was perhaps at stake. And there exists a strong cultural aversion to
suicide in Egypt. The country’s tourist sector, vital to the economy and served
by Egypt Air, would have suffered a serious blow had it been revealed
immediately post 9/11 that one of their pilots was responsible for flying an
Egypt Air  aircraft into the ocean, dooming all its passengers

The point is, all the evidence
indicates a pilot who deliberately crashed his aircraft by reason of suicide—on
the evidence, no other conclusion really stood a chance. Yet vital reports by
accident investigators whose duty it was to expose the exact reasons for the
crash of Flight 990, deliberately watered down and molded the report to suit
the politics of the day, and in the case of Egypt’s ECAA, they almost totally
ignored the facts.

Further disturbing acts earned
Al-Batouti a severe reprimand from the senior captain on board Flight 990.

And yet despite such troubling
behavior, Al-Batouti was still allowed take lone control of an airliner with
217 passengers on board.

The Federal Aviation Administration requires that US
commercial pilots pass rigorous physical examination every six months if they
are over 40 years old; yearly if under, as well as an assessment of their
emotional stability.

The failure rate is low. In the
US, for every 1,000 pilots tested, only two are denied certification for
psychoneurotic disorders. Such pilots are grounded until they can pass the
examination, if ever.

Around the world, mental
health is a taboo issue, so it is with aviation. Pilots run a mile from any
mention of the word; any hint of the illness can end your flying career. Enough
to deter any pilot who may think there is a problem brewing.

David Powell of the
Occupational and Aviation Medicine Unit at Otago University in Wellington, New
Zealand, thinks aviation is going in the wrong direction when it comes to
mental health. “Depression is common and treatable, so surely the best way to
manage it in aviation is to bring it out of hiding,” he says.

However, just as no security
is fool proof, neither is any examination or test.

The most notorious suicide flights were carried out by men
with basic flying skills while one, Hani Hanjour, had a commercial pilot's
license. In the 9/11 attacks, Al Qaeda terrorists penetrated airport security and
managed to hijack four US aircraft. The rest is an infamous blot on history.

As any air passenger can
attest to, since 9/11 rigorous security has been enforced in airports
worldwide. And yet deadly terrorist incidents still occur.

On Dec 25, 2009, Umar Farouk
Abdulmutallab, a Nigerian national with an Al Qaeda connection, attempted to
blow up Northwest Airlines Flight 253 travelling from Amsterdam to Detroit with
290 people on board. Abdulmutallab had sewn plastic explosives into his
underwear. The device—a binary chemical bomb and “a weapon of mass destruction”
according to the FBI charge sheet—failed to detonate properly as the aircraft
approached Detroit. The terrorist’s clothes were set on fire in the attempt and
a Dutch passenger, Jasper Schuringa, tackled and restrained him as other
passengers helped put out the blaze, which in itself had the potential to cause
serious havoc and damage on board.

This incident had the capacity
to cause mass death and destruction but failed because of the clumsy attempts
of the terrorist and the quick actions of passengers and crew.  But terrorists
learn from their mistakes.

In the words of one security
expert, Johannes Beck, “There are always cracks in a suit of armor. A terrorist
only has to succeed once but security or counter-terrorist agencies whose task
it is to prevent the terrorists have to succeed all the time.”

There are no reasons to
believe that terrorist attacks will not continue, despite added and increased
measures to counter it. Terrorists will simply try to find new ways to overcome
the counter-measures. The dissolution of Al Qaeda, like the dissolution of the
PLO, may create a whole constellation of new and determined terror groups whose
focus will be to hit western interests, and that especially includes aviation
targets, because such incidents target large numbers of innocent civilians and
create such a high media profile.

The Achilles’ heel of the
airline business is its regular schedules and its massive volume of passengers.
In an effort to stem further binary bomb attacks such as the December 25th
incident, full-body scanners are to be introduced into major international
airports.

But as security expert Beck
adds, “Body scanners of themselves are not going to end the terrorist threat.
The terrorists will simply discover more devious and clever ways of trying to
hijack or destroy an aircraft. Body scanners may put an extra barrier in their
path but the terrorist will eventually find a way of overcoming that additional
barrier, and any other that is put in their path.”

The truth is, any security
tends to be reactive, in that it often shifts up a gear or two or alters its
focus after the event: listen to the media reports in the aftermath of an
incident or attack and you’ll hear the oft-quoted “Passengers face even tighter
security and longer delays at international airports after today’s terrorist
threat…”

How much tighter can you make
already tight security?

Obviously it wasn’t watertight
to begin with.

The terrorist threat is also
one of the major concerns of the International Federation of Airline Pilots
Association, the umbrella group which represents pilots worldwide. The US body,
ALPA International, which was successful in pushing for passenger screening in
the 70’s recently produced a white paper on this threat.

“A profoundly important gift
was given to commercial aviation on Christmas Day 2009 when a failed terrorist
attack against Northwest Flight 253 provided a wake-up call. We were reminded
yet again, that highly determined radicals and extremists continue to plot new
and different ways to inflict great economic harm on an airline industry which
has yet to fully recover from the staggering costs inflicted on September 11,
2001.”